Upton Sinclair, ed. (18781968).The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. 1915.

Women and Economics

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

(Americas most brilliant woman poet and critic; born 1860)

RECOGNIZING her intense feeling on moral lines, and seeing in her the rigidly preserved virtues of faith, submission, and self-sacrificequalities which in the dark ages were held to be the first of virtues,we have agreed of late years to call woman the moral superior of man. But the ceaseless growth of human life, social life, has developed in him new virtues, later, higher, more needful; and the moral nature of woman, as maintained in this rudimentary stage by her economic dependence, is a continual check to the progress of the human soul. The main feature of her lifethe restriction of her range and duty to the love and service of her own immediate familyacts upon us continually as a retarding influence, hindering the expansion of the spirit of social love and service on which our very lives depend. It keeps the moral standard of the patriarchal era still before us, and blinds our eyes to the full duty of man.